PHILOSOPHY has always made use of its past. In doing so, it resembles literature more than it does the natural sciences, which generally regard the scientific concepts and systems of history as superseded, useless hulks drifting in the wake of empirical and conceptual progress. Literature, on the contrary, cherishes the monumental achievements of previous ages; they retain value and importance, and can be turned to for interest and for inspiration again and again. Philosophy has sometimes claimed to take a radical (...) turn which leaves the past behind, but in the long run the past returns to assert itself as living and useful. There are fashions in philosophy, of course, but it is never safe to regard any major philosophic system or approach as forever refuted and surpassed. As witness, we see how the current analytic movement is rediscovering pragmatism, once thought hopelessly old hat. (shrink)

One cannot blame all this on the dead hand of, say, the Aristotelian conception of First Philosophy, although that and other classic positions have played their part. It can hardly be held that those who doctrinally profess allegiance to the conception of philosophy as created in the image of science have helped much more than they have hindered. Accepting the older, orthodox account of the course of previous philosophic thinking as detached from science, they have been happier demonstrating their predecessors' (...) vulnerability than in reshaping that account fruitfully. There is a vacuity about the pronouncements of men so eminent-and diverse--as Bertrand Russell and John Dewey, which renders their extensive influence unfortunate in many respects. (shrink)

“Here is the first Kant-biography in English since Paulsen’s and Cassirer’s only full-scale study of Kant’s philosophy. On a very deep level, all of Cassirer’s philosophy was based on Kant’s, and accordingly this book is Cassirer’s explicit coming to terms with his own historical origins. It sensitively integrates interesting facts about Kant’s life with an appreciation and critique of his works. Its value is enhanced by Stephen Körner’s Introduction, which places Cassirer’s Kant-interpretation in its historical and contemporary context.”—Lewis White Beck (...) “The first English translation of a 60-year-old classic intellectual biography. Those readers who know Kant only through the first _Critique_ will find their understanding of that work deepened and illuminated by a long explication of the pre-critical writings, but perhaps the most distinctive contribution is Cassirer’s argument that the later _Critiques_, and especially the _Critique of Judgment_, must be understood not as merely applying the principles of the first to other areas but as subsuming the latter into a larger and more comprehensive framework.”—Frederick J. Crown, _The Key Reporter _“_Kant’s Life and Thought_ is that rare achievement: a lucid and highly readable account of the life and work of one of the world’s profoundest thinkers. Now for the first time available in an admirable English translation, the book introduces the reader to two of the finest minds in the history of philosophy.”—Ashley Montagu. (shrink)

IN HIS ESSAY The Paradox of Socrates," Gregory Vlastos paints a vivid and moving portrait of Socrates, or, as he puts it: "the Platonic Socrates, or, to be more precise, the Socrates of Plato’s early dialogues." That the man who emerges from these early dialogues is something very like the actual Socrates is Vlastos’s opinion. He argues, with great plausibility, that the Xenophontic Socrates is not a man who, on the one hand, could have provoked the Athenians into indicting him (...) and convicting him for subversion of Athenian faith and morals, and on the other could have aroused the devotion of an Alcibiades. The question of the "authentic" Socrates is the kind of question which simply does not admit of any ultimate solution, so there will always be divergent opinions, but regardless of whether or not Plato does portray the real Socrates as he knew him, it is certainly the Platonic Socrates who has exercised the decisive influence down through the centuries. Therefore irrespective of whether one accepts Vlastos’s argument, it is worthwhile examining what Vlastos distills from the dialogues as his "recreation of the thought and character of the man," and testing it for its adequacy. (shrink)

The character of these books should be less unexpected when one notes that their author, A. C. Crombie, is not only lecturer in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University College, London, but is also the editor of The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. One would expect, then, that his approach to the problems of the philosophy of science would naturally proceed through the history of science, and that he would be less interested in elaborating the (...) details of a particular doctrine in the philosophy of science than in viewing the events of the history of science in their larger aspects, aspects which merge insensibly into the phases of the history of philosophy. And just this is the case. (shrink)

The watershed for the latter discipline was the establishment of the Hegelian philosophy, with its thesis that the history of philosophy was philosophy itself. Hegel's lectures on the history of philosophy appeared posthumously but his influence was already confirmed. The first really inclusive history of science which is of more than antiquarian interest, William Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences, was published almost simultaneously in 1837. For Whewell as well as for Hegel, history and philosophy were connected; Whewell's History was (...) written in close relation to his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, which he in one place called the "moral" of the other work. Surveying the astonishing advances of science, especially in the previous century and a half, he expressly aimed to clarify the method responsible for them. Philosophically, he was a curious hybrid between Kant and Francis Bacon, seeing in scientific development the progressive articulation of certain a priori "Ideas." But despite these early and vigorous beginnings, the study of the history of science has generally lagged behind that of its sister study, perhaps because the impetus of scientific expansion and specialization has discouraged scientists from examination of their own intellectual antecedents, and at the same time has debarred non-scientists from sufficient technical understanding to perform the task adequately. The edges of the old wound between the Natur- and the Geisteswissenschaften healed apart rather than together, to the detriment of both. (shrink)